


Tick Tock

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, genprompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 10:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4015939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>WHAAAAAAT am I writing again? Yeah, kind of.  Have a little wee bitty thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tick Tock

It’s just an engine , Nux told himself.  Just a different kind of engine. That’s all.    There’s never been an engine he couldn’t fix, not with the right parts, and patience and...time.  

 

Time was what he didn’t have: moments like these, he could feel time slipping away from him, like a drive belt sliding under his feet, making him feel all off-balance and uneasy-like.  Not afraid. No. Not afraid. War Boys feared nothing: death was just end of half-life, the gates swinging wide to the ride eternal.  It was nothing to be afraid of.  

 

Only thing he feared was dying away from those gates, passing in his sleep, pissed-bed and stinking, a limp sag of bones, dragged from his little cubby, smeared in his own filth. He’d seen it before, done it before, gotten his cubby from the scrawny sweat-rancid corpse he’d pulled out, years ago.  Sometimes, sometimes, he could smell the stink of it, as though lonely death had seeped into the stone itself, weeping out in the darkest sick-stretched hours of the night, summoned by night sweats.  

 

Nux wanted what all War Boys wanted: a chance. Nothing more than a chance, not to live, but to die being seen, die witnessed and brave.  It didn’t seem too much to ask, did it? To die for the V8, chrome and gleaming?  

Maybe it was too much to ask. Maybe he wasn’t one for Valhalla, after all.

  
No. He didn’t like those thoughts, the way they came, creeping like rats, into his brain. Tumors, in their own rights, malignant and insidious, trying to choke hope out of him.  Nux pushed them aside, turning his attention to the small wrench, the smaller gears of the clock laid open on his workbench. He would get it working again, fix it, so it could count down the hours of his life, steadier than his heartbeat, fix it so it ran long after his own time ran out. 


End file.
